Marien was making a play upon his word "calculate."

"Seven years, I should say," replied John, thinking back.

"Seven years?" she mused. "Seven! And you feel that it has paid?"

"Immensely," replied John aggressively.

"By the way, how old are you, Ursus?"

This was what the old actor had asked. People were always asking John

how old he was.

"Twenty-five," John answered a trifle apologetically. "I got started

late. And you?"

The question was put without hesitation, as if it were the next thing to

say.

"A man does not ask a woman her age in polite conversation," suggested

Marien tentatively.

"He does not," replied John quickly, "if he thinks the answer is likely

to be embarrassing."

Marien's face flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, hear him!" she laughed. "This heavy man is not so heavy, after

all; but," she added, with another insinuating inflection, "he is always

calculating." Then she went on, "You are right. The confession to you

at least is not embarrassing. I am twenty-four years old, and I, too,

have been living a calculating life for seven years."

"For seven years. How odd!" remarked John, rather excited at

discovering even a slight parallel between himself and this brilliant

creature.

"Yes," Marien replied. "I ran away from home at sixteen. I have been

on the stage eight years. The first year was a careless one. The other

seven have been--_calculating_ years."

John could think of no words in which to describe the sinister

significance which Marien now managed to get into her drawling utterance

of that word "calculating." She made it express somehow the plotting

villainies of an Iago, of a Richard the Third and a Lady Macbeth, and

then overlaid the sinister note with something else, an impression of

lofty abandon, of immolation, as if, in calculating her life, she had

laid upon the altar all there was of herself--everything--in order to

attain some supreme end.

John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of a woman who was

not only ambitious as he was ambitious, but wildly, dangerously

ambitious, with a danger that was not to herself alone, but to any who

stood near enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,--dangerous to

one who might love her, for example!

He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only for a moment, and

to be crowded out immediately by another thought, or indeed, a

succession of thoughts, all induced by the picture she made amid her

cushions.

How beautiful she was! How very, very beautiful! And how magnetic! How

she had made the blood run in his veins when she lay upon his breast as

Lygia, their hearts beating, their souls stirring together!

And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his company, had given

him her confidence, was awaiting, as it seemed, his pleasure,--while the

color came and went in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the

dark pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown which

sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a part of her very

self.

Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to induce thoughts and

began to stimulate impulses. Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a

hand upon her. She was so alluring and so, so helpless.

For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of her as possibly the

woman of his destiny,--not admitting it, but still dreaming it. Here in

his presence, she suddenly ceased to be even a woman. She was just

Woman; and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the

woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the

whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.

An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of

coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty

little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his

nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever

eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his

brain was reeling; he was going to faint,--and with mere appetite. Yet

the appetite was not for food.

With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The

shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was

somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting

Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand

old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles

Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy

ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full

of racial dynamite.

And Woman was fulminating the dynamite. Deliberately--or recklessly--or

innocently; but none the less surely. Her lips were pliant. Her form

was plastic. The smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping

lazily, the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white soft

shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical charm. To this, Woman

added the subtle, maddening witchery of silence,--breathing, watchful,

waiting quiet.

This silence continued until it became oppressive, explosive even.

Would she not speak? He could not. Would she not move? He dared not.

As if in response to this frenzy of thought, the ripe lips parted in a

smile that added one more lovely detail to the picture by revealing rows

of pearly, even teeth, and her hand began to move toward him.

"Don't touch me--don't," he found himself pleading suddenly.

But already the hand was laid tenderly upon his own, and Hampstead

returned the clasp like one who holds the poles of a battery and cannot

let go.

Laughing softly, Woman drew Man gently to her, his eyes gazing

fascinated into the depths of hers, his body bending weakly, nearer and

nearer.

"John!" she breathed softly, "John!"

But at the first warmth of breath upon his cheek, the explosion came.

He snatched her in his arms as if she had been a child, and pressed her

to his heart rapturously, but violently. And then his lips found hers,

vehemently, almost brutally, as if he would take revenge upon them for

the passion their sight and touch had roused in him. She struggled, but

he pressed her tighter and tighter, till at length she gave up, and he

felt only the rhythmic pulsing of her body.

When at length he released the lips and held the face from him to gaze

into it fondly, her eyes were closed, and the head fell limply over his

arm with the long tresses sweeping to the floor.

In sudden compunction he placed her tenderly upon the divan.

"I have hurt you, Marien; I have hurt you. Forgive me; oh, forgive me!"

he implored in tones of deep feeling.

When she remained quite motionless, he asked, foolishly, "Marien, have

you fainted?"

Slowly her bosom rose with a respiration so deep and long that it seemed

to stir every fold of her pleated gown and every cushion on the divan,

while with the eyes still closed the face moved gently from side to side

to convey the negative.

"Thank God!" he groaned, dropping to his knees beside her, where,

seizing her hand, he began to press his kisses upon it.

Presently disengaging the hand, Marien lifted it, felt her way over his

face and began to push back the towsled mop of hair from his brow, and

to stroke it affectionately.

"I thought I had hurt you," he crooned.

"You did," she murmured.

"Oh, I am so, so sorry," he breathed, seizing her hand once more and

pressing it against his heart.

"I do not think I am sorry," she sighed contentedly, and was still

again, the lashes lying flat upon her cheeks, the long tresses in

disarray about her head.

Lying there so white and motionless, she looked to John like a crushed

flower. Her very beauty was broken. As he gazed, remorse and

contrition overcoming him, her lips parted in a half smile while she

whispered:

"The--the calculated life cannot always be depended upon, can it?"

Innocently spoken, the words came to John with the force of a reproach,

which hurt all the more because he was sure no reproach had been meant.

She had trusted him, and he had failed. His sense of guilt was already

strong. At the words he leaped up and rushed toward the hat-tree upon

which his hat and coat had been disposed. Yet before he could seize

them and start for the door, Marien was before him, barring his way,

looking pale but majestic, like a disheveled queen.

"Let me go," he said stubbornly. "I am unworthy to be here."

"Stay," she whispered, in a tone sweeter, tenderer, than he had ever

heard her use before. "It is my wish. I do not," and she hesitated for

a word, "I do not misunderstand you--poor, lonely, hungry man!"

"Supper, Madame!" piped the voice of Julie.

*CHAPTER XII*

*A THING INCALCULABLE*

One whole month passed before John sat again at midnight in the Roman

chair with Marien _vis-a-vis_ upon her heaped-up cushions. Many things

may happen in a month. Many did in this. For John it was a month of

progress in his art. Though the People's Stock Company had passed out

of existence within two weeks after Marien Dounay's departure from it,

John had done so well that he found no difficulty in securing an

engagement as heavy man across the bay in Oakland with the Sampson

Stock, the grade of which was higher and its permanency well

established.

It was also a month of progress in his passion for Marien Dounay,

although during all those thirty days he did not see her once. In the

meantime imagination fed him. Every memory of that night and every

deduction from those memories fanned the flame of his infatuation. Each

in itself was slight, but they were like a thousand gossamer webs. Once

spun, their combined holding power was as the strength of many cables.

Take, for instance, the environment in which he found her. It spoke

gratifyingly to him of a genuinely good, modest nature to see that she

shrank away from the garish theatrical hotels to this quiet nest with

Julie. It revealed a true woman's instinct for domesticity not only

surviving but flourishing in this vagabond life to which her profession

compelled her.

And yet how unlike the life of the fine women he had known in the old

First Church. It would have so shocked them,--this roving, Bohemian

life that turned the night into day, the deep-sleep time from twelve to

three into the leisure, happy, carefree hours that were like the sun at

noon instead of the dark of midnight. How unbecoming it would have been

in those coddled home-keeping women of the First Church, this reversal

of life,--how immoral even! Yet to her it was natural. In her it was

moral. It did pay a proper respect to those conventions which protect

the character and happiness of woman. It was not prudish. It was

better than prudish, it was good. Her virtue was not forced. It was

hardy, indigenous, self-enveloping. Yes, this whole mode of life became

her in her profession.

And the thought that he was of her profession threw him into raptures.

Hers was a life into which he could enter,--had entered already, by

reason of the favor she had shown him. What could that favor mean?

Nothing else but love. She had given him too much, forgiven him too

much in that one evening for him to question that at all.

And he loved her! Doubt on that score had vanished so many days ago

that he could not remember he had ever doubted it.

That the partnership could not at first be equal, he was humiliatingly

aware; but the development of his own powers would soon balance the

inequality. However, it was something else that for the moment wiped

out of mind the enormity of his presumption, and this was that memory of

unpleasant experiences at which she had hinted. The thought of this

beautiful, ambitious, devoted creature battling her way alone among

selfish, brutal, designing men was maddening to him. The chivalrous

impulse to be with her, to protect her, to battle for her, made him

forget entirely considerations of inequality, and he prepared to offer

himself boldly. If she did not invite him again soon, he meant to seek

her out; but the invitation came before his processes had reached that

stage.

John was impatiently prompt. His eyes leaped upon her eagerly as if to

make sure she was still real, still the flesh and blood confirmation of

his passion. She was,--not a doubt of it. Her eye was bright; the

clasp of her hand was warm. Her personal power was never more evident,

its whimsical manifestations never more varied, interesting, or

captivating than now.

To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was larger now, that

supper was not so much a meal as a series of delightful additions to his

impressions of the finer side of the character of Marien. But with the

supper despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in luxurious

relaxation, it was her personality once more rather than her character

which began to play upon him like an instrument with strings. Lazily

she brooded and mused, talked and was silent, drifting from momentary

vivacities to periods of depressed abstraction. Again and again John

felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly almost, it seemed to

him. Because it was a supremely blissful experience to submit himself

thus to the play of her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt

impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a geyser.

"Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour out impetuously the

tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation.

Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with a flush of

pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks. Even when he had

concluded she sat for a moment with lips half parted, eyes half closed,

and an expression of enchantment upon her face as if listening to music

that she wished might flow on forever.

"Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her expression appeared to

change. "The picture is too beautiful to spoil. Let me take from your

lips in silence the kiss that seals our betrothal."

But Marien held him off with sudden strength.

"Marien, I love you. I love you," he protested vehemently.

"No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the pillows and

speaking alertly as if she had just been given words to answer. "You do

not love me. You love the thing you think I am."

John's blond brows were lifted in mute protest.

"Listen!" she exclaimed. "You compelled me to listen. Now I must

compel you to listen--mad, impetuous man!" and she seemed almost

resentful. "In what you have just been saying, you have written a part

for me. You have given me a character. If I could play that part

always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me

always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it

now for an hour and then perhaps never again."

"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone

thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note.

Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the

calculating life."

There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of

the word "calculating."

"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she went on. "I am

not the purring kitten you have described. It angers me to have you

think so. I am not a thing to love and fondle. I am a tigress tearing

at one object. I am," and in the vehement force of her utterance she

seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an ambitious woman! An

unscrupulous, designing, clambering, ambitious woman!"

"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.

"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she rejoined

unhesitatingly. "Love is a thing incalculable." Yet as she uttered

this sentence, her tone softened, and her eyes had a look of awe and

hunger oddly mixed in them; but immediately the expression of resolute

ambition succeeded to her features.

"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.

"But the better part of life may be gone then," John protested bitterly.

"The top! When shall we reach the top?"

"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity comes," Marien answered

with cool assurance. "Nobody, not even myself, knows how good I am.

Any night some man may sit in front who has both the judgment to see and

the money to command playwrights, theaters, New York appearances to

order. When they come, I shall conquer. Oh," and her eyes sparkled

while she shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful

to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know that your wings

are strong enough to fly and you only wait the coming of the breeze. It

is dazzling, intoxicating, to think that within three months I may be a

Broadway star; that within a year the whole English-speaking world may

recognize that a new queen of the emotional drama and of tragedy has

been crowned. Until that hour," and she lowered her voice as she

checked the exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a

millstone."

"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet. I may arrive first!"

Marien looked him up and down and laughed, just laughed,--about the look

and laugh that Parks had given him.

Hampstead's eager face flushed.

"You do not think that possible," he challenged aggressively.

"No, dear boy," replied the woman, her tone and manner swiftly

sympathetic, "I know it is not possible. You do not realize how far you

have to go. If you have genius, you do not show it. You have talent,

temperament, intelligence, application; these may win for you, but the

way will be long and the compensation uncertain. If you persist for

ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years, till some of your exuberance has died,

till experience has rounded you off, till you have learned from that

great big compelling teacher out there in front, the audience, what is

art and what is not; while you may not be accounted a great star, yet

the world will recognize your craftsmanship and concede you a place of

eminence upon the stage, a position well worth occupying, but one for

which you will pay long years before you get it."

"But our love," John protested helplessly.

"Who said 'our love,'" Marien declaimed almost petulantly. "I have not

confessed to any love."

"But--but," and John's eyes opened widely, "you would not permit--"

"I did not permit," she flashed. "You took, and I forgave because I

told you I could understand. Can you not, blind man, also understand?

If man is sometimes man, will not woman also sometimes be woman?"

"Did it mean--no more than that?"

John's eyes searched hers accusingly.

Her answer was to scorn to answer. She made it seem that she was

dismissing him, exactly as any heartless woman might dismiss a favorite

who had amused her for an hour, but whose antics and cajoleries had now

begun to pall.

Dazed and dumb, Hampstead seemed to feel his way backward toward the

door, where Julie came mysteriously, unsummoned, to help him on with his

coat and thrust his hat into his hand. When John turned for a last

look, Marien's back was turned, and though the head was bowed and the

side of the face half concealed, he thought he saw a look of agony upon

it.

"Marien," he murmured hoarsely, with sudden emotion. "Marien!"

But on the instant she raised her face to him, and it was the old face,

wonderful and witching, beaming with a happy, cordial smile as she laid

her hand in his without a sign of restraint of any sort. The very

heartlessness of it completed his bewilderment. Did the woman not know

that she was breaking his heart? It killed his hope; it cowed him and

threw him into a sullen mood.

"Good-by, Miss Dounay," he said huskily.

Her eloquent eyes shot him a look in which reproach and tenderness

mingled, while her hand pulsed quickly like a heart beating in his palm.

What mood of sullenness could withstand that look? Not his. He smiled,

as if a ray of sunshine played upon his face, and amended with:

"Good night, Marien."

"Good-by, John," she answered sweetly.

The door was closed behind him before John realized that with all her

sweetness, she had said good-by, and the emphasis was on the "by."

At the corner the bewildered man turned and looked up. He could see the

lace curtain at the window, but he could not see the pillows on the

divan quivering with sobs from a soft burden that had flung itself among

them when the door was closed.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*THE SCENE PLAYED OUT*

Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying

to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless,

tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he

accepted it as the demonstrated truth.

As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he

could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will

against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her

arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer

affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart; in

short, and by some means not now clear, to overmaster her purpose for

the sake of her own happiness as well as his.

But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in. Now this was not

altogether strange, since John had half-consciously cherished the notion

that he would some day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must

have had a feeling of the same sort toward himself. Perhaps this was

why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps, too, that was why he

kissed her, for he was beginning now to understand some things better

than he had before. Conscience demanded therefore that he write Bessie

a tactful letter which, while vague and general, would yet somehow

reveal the tremendous change in the drift of his affections.

Just that much, however, was going to be hard--a brutal piece of

work--to merely hint that some other woman might be coming more

intimately into his life than this trustful, jolly-hearted companion.

But it was honest and it must, therefore, be done.

Hampstead summoned grimly all his resolution and dipped his pen in ink.

"Dear Bessie," he wrote, and then his pen stopped, and an itching

sensation came into the corners of his eyes and a lump into his throat.

Presently he laid the pen down as resolutely as he had taken it up. He

could not write Bessie out of his life, after all; at least not like

that. Instead he wrote a letter that was a lie, or that started out to

be a lie; but the surprising thing to Hampstead was that while he wrote,

visioning Bessie at home in Los Angeles, rose-embowered, or walking to

school beneath rows of palms, he was himself transported to Los Angeles,

and the letter was not false. He was back again in the old life, and

Bessie was an interesting and necessary part of it.

Yet he found he could not seal himself into the old life when he closed

the flap of the envelope. The moment the letter was mailed, his mind

went irresistibly back to Marien, whom it was a part of his plan to see

that very day. This was possible because Mowrey rehearsals were long

and somewhat painful affairs.

Hurrying from the Sampson Stock, at the end of his own rehearsal, John

was able to cross the bay and reach the Grand Opera House while Mowrey's

people were still wearily at work, and to make his way apparently unseen

through the huge, gloomy auditorium to a box which was deep in shadow,

as boxes usually are at rehearsal time.

Marien was "on", and the big fellow's heart leaped at the sound of her

voice; yet presently it stood still again, for his jealous ear had

detected a disquieting note in her utterance, a sort of cajoling purr

which the lover recognized instantly. It was not Marien Dounay in

rehearsal, nor yet in "character"; it was Marien herself when in her

most ingratiating mood, and was meant neither for the rehearsal nor for

the character, but for the actor who played the opposing role.

Who, by the way, was this handsome man, with the rare, low voice that

combined refinement and carrying power, so absolutely sure of himself,

whose every move betokened the seasoned, accomplished actor, and who

displayed to perfection those very graces which John himself hoped some

day to exhibit?

In the box in front of Hampstead was another ghostly figure, also

watching the rehearsal. John reached forward and touched him on the

shoulder, whispering hollowly: "Who is the new leading man?"

"Charles Manning of New York," was the reply; "specially engaged for

this and three other roles."

"Thank you," said John, swallowing hard, for now he understood perfectly

the disagreeable meaning of those cajoleries. They represented just one

more element in Marien Dounay's calculating life. This New York actor

might go back and drop the word that would bring her opportunity, the

thing her vaulting ambition coveted more than it coveted love.

Therefore she was taking deliberate advantage of these situations to

kindle a personal interest in herself, for which, once her object was

gained, she would refuse responsibility as heartlessly as she had tried

to reject the big man who just now started so violently as he watched

her.

Look at that now! The stage direction had required Manning to take

Marien in his arms for a minute. Hampstead ground his teeth.

Well, why didn't they separate? What was she clinging to him so long

for? Why, indeed, if it were not for this same reason that to John,

stewing in jealous rage, seemed despicable and base. This was not nice;

it was not womanly; it was not a true reflection of Marien's character.

It was, he assured himself hotly, one of the things from which he must

save her.

But he had no opportunity to begin his work of salvation that afternoon,

for rehearsal ended, Marien walked out with Charles Manning so closely

in her company that Hampstead could not so much as catch her eye, and

his emotions were in such a riot that he dared not trust himself to

accost her.

When John had walked the streets for an hour, with the storm of his

feelings rising instead of settling, he resolved upon a note to Marien

and went to the office of the _Dramatic Review_ to dispatch it.

"Dear Marien," he wrote. "I must see you to-night. I will call at

twelve. JOHN."

The brevity of this communication was deliberately calculated to express

his headlong mood and the depths of his determination. He had not asked

an answer, but waited for one, assuring himself that if none came he

would call just the same. Yet the answer was ominously prompt. John

tore it open with brutal strength and saw Marien's handwriting for the

first time. It was vigorous and rectangular, but unmistakably feminine,

and there was neither salutation nor signature.

"Stupid!" the note began abruptly. "I saw you in the box to-day. I

will not have you spying upon me. You must not call. I have tried to

make you understand. Why can you not accept the situation? Or are you

mad enough to compel me to stage the scene and play it out for you?"

John read the note twice, crumpled it in his hand, and walked slowly

down Geary Street to Market and down Market Street to the ferry.

In the second act that night he forgot to take on the knife with which

he was to stab his victim, and nearly spoiled the scene, through having

to strangle him instead.

"_Stage the scene and play it out for you?_" What could she mean by

that.

Determined to find out, John hurried from the theater at the close of

the performance, with his lips pursed stubbornly, and at exactly twelve

o'clock Julie was answering his ring at the door of the little apartment

on Turk Street.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, smiling cordially. "It is the big man again. No,

Madame is not in. She is having supper out to-night. With whom? La!

la! I should not tell you that," and Julie shrugged one shoulder only,

after a way of hers, and made a movement to close the door; but

something in John's eyes induced her to add, with both sympathy and

chiding in her tone: "You must not come to see Madame when Madame does

not want you."

"But I must see her, Julie!" John pleaded huskily, rather throwing

himself upon the mercy of the little French woman.

Julie gazed at him doubtfully. She had fended off the attentions of

many an importunate suitor from her beautiful mistress but never one who

engaged at once so much of her sympathy and respect as he. In her mind

she was weighing something; reflecting perhaps whether it was not

kindness to this big, earnest man to let his own eyes serve him. Her

decision was evidently in the affirmative.

"If you go quickly to the entrance of Antone's," she suggested

hurriedly, "you will see Madame arriving presently in an automobile."

Stubborn as John was in his purpose, he nevertheless flushed that even

Julie could think him capable of standing at the door of a French

restaurant at midnight waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved

in the company of another man. Yet pride was so completely swallowed up

in jealousy and passion that another five minutes found him loitering

before the entrance to Antone's, resolving to go, to stay; to look and

not to look; feeling now weakly ashamed of himself and now meanly

resolute.

The place was half underground, with a gilded and illumined entrance

that yawned like the mouth of a monster. John was sure from its outward

look that Antone's was no more than half respectable. The fragrance of

the food which assailed his nostrils was, he felt equally sure, an

expensive fragrance. A meal there would cost as much as a week of meals

where he was accustomed to take his food. Manning, of course, had a

fine salary. He could afford to take Marien for an automobile ride and

to Antone's for supper.

Hampstead's envious rage flamed again at this thought, but at the moment

the flash of a headlight in his eyes called attention to an automobile

just then sweeping in toward the curb. However, instead of the

stalwart, graceful figure of Manning, there emerged from the car a

squat, oily-faced man, huge of paunch, with thick lips, a heavy nose,

pouched cheeks, and small, pig-like eyes, upon whose broad countenance

hung an expression of bland self-complaisance. By an odd coincidence,

this man was also connected with the stage. John knew him by sight as

Gustav Litschi, and by reputation as a very swine among men, utterly

without scruple, although endowed with an uncanny business sense; a man

who had money and whose theatrical ventures always made money, though

often their character was as doubtful as himself.

Disappointed, Hampstead nevertheless experienced a feeling of curiosity

as to Litschi's companion, and before drawing back, followed the gross

glance of the gimlet eyes within the car to where they rested gloatingly

upon a woman in evening clothes, who was gathering her train and cloak

about her preparatory to being helped from the car. To John's utter

amazement the woman was Marien.

For a moment he stared as if confronted with a specter, then felt his

great hands itching while he wavered between a desire to leap upon this

coarse creature and tear him to pieces, and the impulse to accost Marien

with reproaches and a warning. But the swift reflection that she

probably knew the man's character perfectly well prompted John instead

to the despicable expedient of deliberately spying upon her. Turning

impetuously, he ran quickly down the steps in advance of the couple.

"One?" queried the headwaiter, with a keen estimating glance under which

John ordinarily would have felt himself to shrivel; but now a frenzy of

jealousy and a sense of outrage had made him bold.

"Yes," he replied brusquely; "that seat yonder in the corner where I can

see the whole show."

It was a lonely and undesirable table, smack against the side of the

wall, along which ran a row of curtained, box-like alcoves that served

as tiny private dining rooms. John could have it and welcome. He got

it, and as he turned to sit down, his eye scanned the interior swiftly

for Marien and Litschi. To his surprise they were coming straight at

him, Marien leading. Certain that she had seen him and was going to

address him, John nevertheless determined to await a look of recognition

before arising. To his further surprise, no such look came. Coldly,

icily beautiful to-night, the glitter in her eyes was hard and

desperate, with a suggestion of menace in it, reminding John of that

momentary intuition he had once experienced, that this woman could be

dangerous. Her note had warned him not to spy upon her, he recalled. It

must be that her discovery of his presence had roused a devil in her

now. So strong did this feeling become that he felt a relief as great

as his surprise when she brushed by as if oblivious of his presence and

passed from view into the nearest box, the curtain of which a waiter was

holding aside obsequiously.

When the screening curtain dropped, swinging so near that John could

have reached across his table and touched it with a hand, he had a sense

of sudden escape, as if a tigress, sleekly beautiful and powerfully

cruel, had over-leaped him to tear a richer prey beyond. The swine-like

Litschi, waddling after her into the box, was the chosen victim. Yonder

by the curb John had feared for Marien; now, repulsive as the creature

was, he felt a kind of pity for Litschi.

Yet with the curtain drawn, Hampstead's emotion passed swiftly back to

love and anxiety for her. She had not seen him, that was all. The

supposed look of menace was the product of his imagination and his

jealousy.

As the minutes passed unnoted, this anxiety grew again into sympathy and

consideration. Marien had complained to him of the hard things she had

to do. This supper with Litschi was merely one of them. That scene

with Manning was another. He reflected triumphantly that she had not

welcomed Litschi to her apartment; but compelled him to bring her to

this public place. Poor, brave girl! She had to play with all these

men; to warm them without herself getting burnt; to woo them desperately

upon the chance: Manning that he might somewhere speak the fortunate

word, Litschi that in some greedy hope of gain he might be induced to

risk his money on the venture that would give Marien the opportunity for

which she had been calculating indomitably for seven years.

But what was that?

John's hand reached out and clutched the table violently, while his body

leaned forward as if to rise. What was that she had said so loudly he

could hear, and so astonishing that he could not believe his ears?

He had been sitting there such a long, long time, thinking thoughts like

these, stirred, soothed, and stirred again by the sound of her voice,

heard intermittently between the numbers of the orchestra. He had

ordered food and eaten, then ordered more and eaten that,--anything to

think and wait, he did not know for what.

Waiters bearing trays had come and gone unceasingly from behind the

curtain four feet from his eyes, and he knew that they had borne more

bottles than food. Several times he had heard a sound like "shots

off-stage." This sound always succeeded the entry of a gold sealed

bottle. Evidently they were drinking heavily behind the curtain,

Litschi's voice growing lower and less coherent, and Marien's louder and

less reserved, till for some time he had been catching little snatches

of her conversation. She had been talking about her future, painting a

picture of the success she would make when her opportunity came; but now

she had said the thing that staggered him.

"What?" he came near to saying aloud; and at the same time he heard the

drink-smothered voice of Litschi also with interrogative inflection.

Litschi, too, wanted to be sure that he had heard aright.

"I say," iterated the voice of Marien deliberately, as if with

calculated carrying power, "that a woman who is ambitious must be

prepared to pay the price demanded--her heart, her soul--if need

be--_herself_!"

She plumped out the last word ruthlessly, and broke into a half-tipsy

laugh that had in it a suggestion unmistakable as much as to say:

"You understand now, don't you, Gustav Litschi? You realize what I am

offering to the man who buys me opportunity?"

Her heart--her soul--herself! Hampstead, having started up, sat down

again weakly, the cold sweat of horror standing out upon his brow.

So this was what she had meant all the time in her speech about the

calculating life. She could not give herself up to love him or any one,

because she was dangling herself as a final lure to the man who would

give her opportunity.

"Why, this woman was spiritually--morally--potentially, a--" he could

barely let himself think the hateful word. To utter it was impossible.

Perhaps she was worse! A choking, burning sensation was in his throat.

He tore at it with his hands, gasping for breath. He wanted to tear at

the curtain--at the woman! How he hated her! She had no longer any

fineness. She was a coarse, designing, reckless--_prostitute_! There!

In his agony, the word was out. He sent it hurtling across the stage of

his own brain. It flew straight. It found its mark upon the face of

his love and stuck there blotched and quivering, biting into the picture

like acid. It ate out the eyes of Marien Dounay from his mind; it ate

away her pliant ruby lips, her cheeks and her soft round chin, and it

left of that face only a grinning hideousness from which John Hampstead

shrank with a horrible sickness in his heart.

At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under the sweep of an

impetuous arm, and with the suddenness of an apparition, Marien stood

just across the table from him. Her face was highly colored, but the

preternatural brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a

loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were curled by a

mocking smile.

"Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive look in her eyes,

insinuating scorn in her tones. "Now that I have played out the scene,

do you think you understand?"

John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the horror he had

heard and was now seeing; but his self-control was perfect, and a kind

of dignity invested him for the moment.

"Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I understand!"

The tone of finality that went into this latter word was unescapable.

As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of her lightning changes of

manner but failed, breaking instead into a fit of hysterical laughter,

during which, with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she

disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended abruptly in

something like a choke, or a fit of coughing.

But John's indignation and disgust were so great that he did not concern

himself as to whether Miss Dounay's laughter might be choking her or

not. Embarrassed, too, by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him

from the nearer tables where the diners had observed the incident

without gathering any of its purport, his only impulse was to pay his

bill and escape, before the building and the world came clattering down

upon him.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*THE METHOD OF A DREAM*

So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature was the effect of

Marien Dounay's startling disclosure that he experienced a partial

arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.

Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was

again about his work; but the days went by mechanically--days of risings

and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of

speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on

and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved

with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split

consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe

is thinking.

He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the

charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the

message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his

dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of

meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.

Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he felt rage and

humiliation at having so duped himself over Marien Dounay, he had no

sense of pain. He was like a man run over by a railroad train who

experiences no throb of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in

his mangled limbs.

Recognizing that his condition was not normal, Hampstead wondered if he

could be going insane. He was eating little; he was taking no interest

in his work. He went and came from the theater automatically, impatient

of company, impatient of noise, of newspaper headlines, of interruptions

of any sort, anxious only to get to his room, to throw himself into a

chair or upon a bed, and relapse into a state of mental drooling. After

several days he roused from one of these reveries with the clear

impression that some presence had been there in the room, had breathed

upon him, had touched his lips, and spoken to him. He leaped up and

looked about him. He opened the door and scanned the corridor. No one

was there,--no echo of corporeal footsteps resounded.

Realizing that it must have been his own dream that waked him, he came

back sheepishly and tried again to induce that state of mental dusk in

which the odd sensation had been experienced. Soon he roused again with

the knowledge that the presence had been with him and had departed; but

this time a clear picture of the vision remained. It was a woman,--it

was like Marien. It was, he told himself, the image of his Love. He

entertained it sadly, like an apparition from the grave. The vision

came again, but with repeated visits, its form began to change, until it

no longer resembled the form of Marien.

This was exciting; the image might change still further till it

definitely resembled some one else.

This surmise proved correct. It did change more and more until identity

was for a time completely lost, but as days passed, the features ceased

to blur and jumble. The eyes were now constantly blue; the complexion

was consistently pink and white; the hair was brown and began to appear

crinkly; the lips grew shorter, and of a more youthful red; the chin

broadened and appeared fuller and softer. One morning these rosier lips

smiled with a rarer spontaneity than the vision had ever shown before,

and with the smile came two dimples into the peach-blow cheeks.

"Bessie!" John cried, with a welcoming shout of incoherent joy.

"Bessie!"

But his joy was speedily swallowed up in the gloom of mortifying

reflections. Could it be that his love was so inconstant as to transfer

itself in a few days from Marien Dounay to Bessie Mitchell, and if it

did, what was such love worth? Besides, how could he love Bessie as he

had loved Marien. There was no fire in her. As yet, she was only a

girl. But at this juncture a memory came floating in of that day on the

Cliff House rocks, when some vague impulse, which he thought to be

sympathy, had made him draw Bessie's face up to his and kiss it. Now, as

he recalled it, the touch of her lips was the touch of a woman; and her

look that puzzled him then,--why, it was the look of love!

Hampstead leaped up excitedly. Bessie was a woman, and she loved him!

And he loved her! But how could he have been such a fool as to think

that he loved Marien?

"Passion," he told himself scornfully, "mere passion."

"She was the first ripe woman I ever touched, and I fell for her!

That's all," he muttered. "But, how could I ever, ever, ever have done

it?"

Heaping bitter self-reproaches, he took his bewildered head in his

hands, while he wrestled with the humiliating chain of ruminations.

Naturally enough, it was the memory of a speech of Marien's which

afforded him his first clue.

"In what you have just been saying, you have given me a character," she

had replied to one of his advances. "If I could play that part always, I

should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I

cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour

and then perhaps never again."

This speech, vexatiously enigmatic then, sounded suddenly rational now.

It meant that he had unconsciously bestowed upon her his idealized

conception of womanhood. This was made comparatively easy because in the

plays Marien almost invariably enacted the heroines, always sweet,

always gentle, and almost always good; or, if erring, they were more

sinned against than sinning. Most of these piled-up virtues of her roles

John dotingly had ascribed to her, and his professional contacts

afforded few glimpses of the real Marien by which his drawing could be

corrected.

Atop of this had come those few hours of delicious intimacy in her

apartment, when she had deliberately played the part she saw that he

would like. This had sufficed to make his illusion complete.

Still John had no reproaches for the actress. Instead, he found within

him a renascence of respect for her, particularly for her frankness.

Most women--most men, too, for that matter, he thought--play the

hypocrite with themselves and with others. He must do her full credit.

She had not done so. She might have ruined him. He owed his escape to

no discernment of his own. When he had not understood, she had

resolutely played the scene out for him--to the uttermost. It must have

cost a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned. Under this

interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive to him. Instead, he

found in her something to admire. Her courage was sublime. Her devotion

to her god, ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent.

"Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her in my arms?

Sympathy," he answered at last. "She never loved me. A woman who loved

a man could not do what she did in the restaurant. She was very sorry

for me, that was all. She let me kiss her as she would let a dog lick

her hand." And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is

sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?"

This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand;

but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and

humiliation.

Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near,

her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself.

But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling

like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this

was all logical and psychological. Patently, it was also biological.

But it was mortifying beyond words. He felt that he had dishonored

himself and dishonored Bessie. He had supposed himself strong; he found

himself weak. He had been swept off his feet and out of his head. He

was ashamed of himself, heartily. Bessie, the good, the pure, the

noble! Why, he could not think of her at all in the terms in which he

thought of Marien Dounay. His instinct for Marien had been to possess.

For Bessie it was to revere, to worship--and yet--and yet--he wanted her

now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had felt for Marien.

Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie. He felt unworthy. He could

not see himself taking her hand, touching her lips, declaring his love

to her now. It seemed to him that he must test his love for Bessie

before he declared it, and purify it by months--years, perhaps,--of

waiting, as if to expiate the sin of his weakness.

But in the meantime, Bessie loved him, and would be loving him all the

time. And he could write to her! Ah, what letters he would write,

letters that would not only keep her love alive but fan it, while he

punished himself for his insane disloyalty.

Disloyalty! Yes, that was the very word. He knew as he reflected that

he had been disloyal ever to yield to the spell of Marien Dounay. He

had been disloyal to Bessie, to his ideals, and to himself.

He turned to where a few days before he had pinned his old Los Angeles

motto on the wall of his Oakland room: "Eternal Hammering is the Price

of Success."

Hammering, he decided, was the wrong word. It was not high enough. He

stepped over to the wall and changed it to the new word so that it read:

"Eternal _Loyalty_ is the Price of Success."

He liked that better; so well, in fact, that he lifted his hand

dramatically and swore his life anew, not to hammering but to

Loyalty,--loyalty to himself, to Bessie, to Dick and Tayna, and to God!

This gave him a feeling of new courage. He turned away as from a

disagreeable experience now forever past. His eyes wandered about the

room exactly as if he had returned from an absence, taking in detail by

detail the familiar, scanty furniture, the hateful spring rocker, the

washstand, the bed, the torn, smoke-soiled curtains at the window, the

picture of Washington at Valley Forge upon the wall, and the dresser

with its cheap speckled mirror.

His glance had just paused mystified at the sight of the unopened

telegram upon the dresser when there was a knock at the door.

With a stride, John turned the key and swung open the door.

Bud, the fourteen-year-old call boy of the Sampson Theater, entered; a

breathless, self-important youngster with freckles and a stubby

pompadour.

"Mr. Cohen's says yer better write a letter ter yer sister," the lad

blurted, while his eyes scanned the room and the actor, where he stood

reaching in a dazed sort of way for the telegram.

"Hey," exclaimed Hampstead, looking up sharply, "my sister?"

"Ye-uh," affirmed Bud stoutly. "Mr. Cohen's got a letter from her, and

she wants to know if yer sick 'r anything."

"By jove, that's right, Bud," confessed John with sudden conviction.

"I've had my mind on something of late, and guess I've rather overlooked

the folks at home. I'll write to-day. Awfully kind of you, old chap, to

come over. Here!"

And Hampstead, now with the telegram in his hand, attempted to cover a

feeling of confusion before these bright, peering eyes by a pilgrimage

to the closet, from which he tossed Bud a quarter. The lad accepted the

quarter thankfully.

"Say, Mr. Hampstead," he broke out impulsively, with an embarrassed note

in his voice, "I'm sorry you got your notice!"

"Got my notice?" asked John a bit sharply.

"Yes. Yer let out," announced Bud, with unfeeling directness, though

consideration was in his heart. "You been good to me, Mr. Hampstead,

and I'm sorry you're goin'. Some of the others is, too."

But John was roused now, thoroughly.

"Why, Bud, what are you talking about?" he demanded, turning accusingly

to the boy.

"For the love of Mike," exclaimed Bud, advancing a little fearsomely and

studying the face of Hampstead with new curiosity, "Yer let out and

don't know it! What'd I tell 'em? Why, there it is," and he snatched up

a blue, thin-looking envelope from the dresser. "Y' got it a week ago

when you got yer pay. Y' ain't opened it even."

Hampstead took the blue envelope from Bud's hand, an awful sense of

weakness running through him as he read that his services would not be

required after the customary two weeks.

"What did I get this for, Bud?" he asked, sensing the uselessness of

dissimulation before this impertinent child.

"Y' got it fer bein' dopey," answered Bud reproachfully. "Y' ain't had

no more sense than a wooden man fer ten days. Say, Mr. Hampstead," he

ventured further with sympathetic friendliness, "yer a good actor when

you let the hop alone. Why don't you cut it? You're young yet. You got

a future, Mr. Cohen says, if you'll let the dope alone."

Hampstead's face took on a queer, half-amused look.

"Is that what he said?"

"That's what he said," affirmed Bud aggressively.

"Well, then, all right, Bud. I will cut it out. Here's my hand on it."

Bud took the hand, a trifle surprised and feeling a little more

important than usual. "Say," he added confidentially, "wise me, will

y'; what kind have you been takin'? Mr. Cohen says he's never seen

nothin' like it, and he thought he'd seen 'em all."

"Oh, it's a little brand I mixed myself," confessed John. "But I'm done

with it. Run along now, Bud. You've been a good pal," and he gave the

lad a pat on the shoulder and a significant shove toward the door.

"Glad I came over," reflected Bud at the door, jingling the quarter in

his pocket. "Better write yer sister, or she'll be comin' up here.

Say," and Bud returned as if for a further confidence, "y' never know

what a woman's goin' to do, do y'? Las' fall a woman shot our leadin'

juvenile in the leg--because she loved him. Get that? Because she loved

him!"

Bud's drawling scorn was inimitable.

"Y' can't figger 'em, can yuh? Some of 'em wants to be called, and some

of 'em don't. Some of 'em wants their letters before the show, and some

of 'em after. Some of 'em is one way one day and the other way the next

day. If I ever get my notice,--if I ever lose my job it'll be about a

woman. I never seen a man yet that I couldn't get his nannie. I never

seen a woman yet that couldn't get mine and get it fresh every time I

run a step fer her. Say! Mr. Hampstead--honest--ain't they the jinx?"

Bud had got his hand on the door, but getting no answer to this very

direct and to him very important question, he turned and scrutinized the

face of the big man curiously at first and then with amazement, as he

exclaimed: "Fer the love of Mike! He ain't heard me. Say, Mr.

Hampstead! Say!" Bud went back and shook the big man's arm, with a

look of apprehension on his face, and shouted very loud, as if to the

deaf: "Say! Come out of it, will y'? Don't write. Telegraph her.

Gosh! She might blame me!"

After which parting gun in behalf of duty and of prudence, with a sigh

and the air of having done a man's best, the lad got hastily through the

door and slammed it after him very loudly.

*CHAPTER XV*

*THE CATASTROPHE*

Bud was right. John had not heard him. He stood with the telegram torn

open in his hand.

"Charles fell from El Capitan," it ran. "Body brought here. ROSE."

For a moment the man gazed fixedly, deliberately but absently crushing

the envelope in one hand, while the other held the open message before

him. Then his lips moved slowly and without uttering a sound, they

framed the words of his thought: "Charles!--Dead!--Merciful God!"

For a reflective interval the gray, startled eyes set themselves on

distance and then turned again to the message. It was dated April 4.

April 4? What day was this?

On the dresser was an unopened newspaper. John remembered now he had

bought it yesterday, or rather he assumed it was yesterday. The date

upon the paper was April 14. If it were yesterday he bought that paper,

to-day was the 15th, and Charles had been dead eleven days! What had

they thought--what had they done without a word from him in this crisis?

What had become of them?

And there were unopened letters on the dresser, three of them, all from

Rose. John tore them open, lapping up their contents with his eyes.

"Poor, poor Rose!" he groaned. "What must she think of me?"

The first letter told of the death of Charles and the lucky sale of

"Dawn in the Grand Canyon" which afforded money for the recovery of the

body and its decent interment, but little more.

The second letter was briefer and expressed surprise at not hearing from

him in response to her message, which the telegraph company assured her

had been delivered to him in person. This letter showed Rose bearing up

under her grief and stoutly making plans for taking up the support of

her children.

The third letter was addressed by the hand of Rose, but the brief note

enclosed was penned by the kind-hearted Doctor Morrison, the railroad's

"company" physician, to whom, as a part of his outside practice, Rose

would have applied in case of illness.

"Your sister," Doctor Morrison wrote, "has suffered a complete nervous

breakdown. Long rest with complete relief from financial care is

imperative."

This letter stirred John to immediate action. He rushed to the

long-distance telephone. The telegraph was not quick enough.

"Please reassure my sister immediately," John telephoned to Doctor

Morrison. "Every provision will be made for her care and that of the

children." Not satisfied with this, John sent a telegram to his sister

direct and to the same effect.

These messages were dispatched as the first and most natural impulses of

the brother's heart, without pause to consider the responsibilities

involved; and then, having no appetite for breakfast, John returned to

his room to write to Rose.

Poor Rose! And poor old Charles! Such an end for him. No great

pictures painted; no roseate successes gathered; just to follow his

vision on and on until in absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he

stepped off the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of feet

to death. Yet John's grief was strangely tempered by the thought that

somehow this death was fitting. It was like the man's life. In art he

had tried to walk the heights with no solid ground of ability beneath,

and he had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.

For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when he thought of Rose,

prostrated, as he was sure, not by grief, but by long anxieties, his

feeling turned to one of reproach. When he thought of the children left

fatherless, with no provision for their future or that of Rose, the

reproach turned to bitterness. He found himself judging Charles very

sternly, and a verse from scripture came into his mind,--something about

the man who provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.

But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's jaw dropped, and he

sat staring at the pen with which he was preparing to write. The

expression on the man's face had changed from concern to one of agony.

When the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless, almost the

look of the dead; for John Hampstead had suddenly perceived that _his

stage career was ended_!

Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own." To give Rose the best of care,

upon which his heart had instantly determined, he must have what were to

him large sums of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money for

doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick and Tayna must be

sent to boarding-school or some place like that for the present, while

their higher education must also be considered and provided for.

John knew he could never do these things and follow the stage. He could

succeed upon the stage; he had proven that, to his own satisfaction at

least; but he could not make money there yet, not for years and years.

Marien was right. If he persisted, rewards would come and affluence.

But they would come at the other end of life. He must have them now.

Perhaps hardest of all to John was the hurt to his pride, to his

self-confidence, the reflection that, having set his eye upon a shining

goal, he must abandon the march toward it unbeaten, with his strength

untested, or with the tests so far made distinctly in his favor. It was

hard to think himself a "quitter." And yet he could feel the stir of a

noble satisfaction in being a "quitter" for duty's sake. He remembered

with a certain sad pleasure how almost prophetically he had told Mr.

Mitchell that it would only be something that would happen to Dick and

Tayna that could keep him from going on with his ambition. Now exactly

that had come to pass; yet to make immediate surrender of the ambition

to which he had devoted himself with such enthusiasm seemed impossible.

He knew what he should do--what he intended to do--but he lacked the

resolution for the moment.

If Bessie were only here!

And yet if she were, he would shrink from her presence. He felt just

now unworthy to look into those trusting eyes of blue. This time he

must face his destiny alone.

His head sank low. His hands were clasped above it, as they had been

that night when he was stricken blind. The world was dark before him.

Now, as then, he felt sorry for himself. In a very few months a great

many things had happened to him that had wrenched him violently. He had

been racked by doubts and inflamed by mysterious emotions. He had hoped

and he had dared; he had struggled; he had gained some things and lost

some; but he had survived, and on the whole was conquering. Now came

the heaviest blow, as it seemed, that could possibly fall upon his

head,--and just in the very hour when the upward way was clearing!

His face was flat upon the page he had meant to fill with words of love

and help to Rose. Above him, on the wall, was the sheet of faded yellow

paper that bore his just amended motto. Two pins, loosened no doubt

when he changed the word on the legend, had been whipped out by the

breeze which swept in through the open window, and this breeze now

fluttered the free end of the yellow sheet insistently like a pennant,

so that the distracted man lifted his clouded eyes and read once again,

as if to make sure:

"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of Success."

"Loyalty to what?" he demanded fiercely of himself. To his ambition? Or

to two little growing lives that trusted and believed in him?

To put the question like that was to answer it. John rose abruptly,

snatched the legend from the wall, crumpled it as he had the envelope,

and cast it on the floor. He didn't need it any more.

"And yet," he reflected after a moment, "why not?"

"Uncle John, when will you be president?" Tayna had asked him that one

night, and he smiled as in fancy he felt her arms again about his neck,

her bare feet cuddling in his lap. The thought roused him. He was not

surrendering all ambition when he surrendered a stage ambition. He was

a man of greatly increased ability now as compared with then. Surely a

man was pretty poor stuff if, having been defeated in one desire through

no fault of his own, he could not carve out another niche for himself

somewhere in the wide hall of achievement. John stooped and recovered

the crumpled square of yellow, smoothed its wrinkles reverently, and

fastened it again and more securely upon the wall above him.

* * * * *

That night John Hampstead went to the theater as usual, but entered the

dressing room like a man going into the presence of his dead.

Throughout the performance he made his entrances and exits solemnly.

The play for this, his final week, was _Hamlet_, and John's part was the

King. Every night as the Prince of Denmark killed him with a rapier

thrust, John enacted that spectacular and traditional fall by which,

since time forgotten, all Kings in _Hamlet_ go toppling to the floor,

where they die with one foot upraised upon the bottom-most step of the

throne, as if reluctant even in death to give up the perquisites and

preeminence of royalty. So hour by hour John felt that he was killing

the King in his soul, but the King died reluctantly, always with one

foot on the throne.

The last night came, and the last hour. Methodically the man assembled

his make-up materials, his grease paints, his hare's feet, and the beard

he had himself fashioned for the King to wear, and put them away, with

their sweetish, unmistakable odor, in the old cigar box, to be treasured

henceforth like sacred things, symbols of a great ambition which had

stirred a young man's breast, and remembrances of the greatest sacrifice

it seemed possible aspiring youth could be called upon to make.

But no one was to know that it was a sacrifice; not Rose, not Dick nor

Tayna even. They were to think he did it happily and because "The

stage--the stage life, you know! Well, probably there are better ways

for a man to spend his energies."

But, really, in his heart of hearts, Hampstead knew he would love the

drama always. He owed it a debt that he could never repay, and some day

when he had achieved a brilliant success in another walk of life--when

Dick and Tayna were grown and far away perhaps--he would take out the

old cigar box and gather his children around him, if he should have

children, and tell them the story of his first divinest ambition as one

tells the story of one's first love; and of the great sacrifice he had

made in the cause of duty, fingering the while these crumbling things as

one caresses a lock of hair of the long departed.

"Look, Bud, here's a box of cold cream--nearly full. You can get a

quarter for it from somewhere along the line," suggested John, nodding

toward the row of dressing rooms as he walked away, his overcoat over

his shoulder, a suitcase in his hand.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*THE KING STILL LIVES*

To make money quickly and steadily and in considerable amounts, was his

immediate necessity. He remembered, naturally, that only seven months

ago William N. Scofield had offered him a salary of twelve thousand

dollars a year, and he went to see that gentleman promptly. But while

the Traffic Manager's eye lighted at sight of him, the light faded.

Scofield did not refer to the offer he had made or the things he had

talked about that night in the Pacific Union Club. He only said

absently: "I will speak to Parsons." The next day Parsons offered

Hampstead a position in the rate department at one hundred dollars per

month. John was not greatly surprised. He knew the world was like that.

Of course, he might have gone next to Mr. Mitchell, but did not. In the

first place John knew that no position which that kind-hearted gentleman

might offer could pay as much money as he must have. In the second

place, he felt himself big with a sense of new-grown powers, of

personality that he wanted to capitalize, not for some employer, but for

himself.

"Seems to me," he communed, as he walked down Market Street, "that I

could sell real estate, or stocks, or bonds; that I could promote

enterprises, work with big men, put through their deals, and make a lot

of money. I believe I will try it."

An advertisement which seemed to promise something like this was

answered by him in person, but it proved instead a proposition to sell

books. John revolted at the idea, but the books interested him greatly.

The set was designed for self-improvement, and the price was thirty

dollars.

"Every time you sell a young man or woman a set of these, you do them

good," he suggested to the manager, with a glow upon his face.

"Exactly," assented that suave gentleman, sighting two prime essentials

of a salesman, faith in his article and a missionary enthusiasm. "You

could make a hundred a week selling 'em!"

One hundred dollars a week! John looked his incredulity.

"What were you doing before?" inquired the manager.

"Acting!"

"Selling books is like acting," mused the manager. "If you are a good

actor, you could make a hundred a week easy."

Because John needed one hundred dollars a week, and reflected that the

experience would be good training for that higher form of salesmanship

upon which he meant to embark, he took his prospectus and started out.

The first week his commissions were $7.50. He had made one sale. But

he needed one hundred dollars worse the second week, and set forth with

greater determination. That week he made two sales. "I've almost got

it," he assured himself, gritting his teeth desperately. And the third

week he did get it. His commissions for six days were $74.50, for the

next week $112.50, for the fifth week $145.00. John Hampstead was

successfully launched upon an enterprise that would care for all his

money wants.

And the work itself was happy work. It was no foot-in-the-door,

house-to-house campaign on which he had entered. Ways were found of

gathering lists of persons likely to be interested. He called upon

these people like a gentleman; he was received and entertained like one.

His self-respecting manner, his stage-trained presence, his growing

store of personal magnetism, his strong, interesting face, with the odd

light of spiritual ardor in his eyes, and the little choke of enthusiasm

that came into his voice, all helped to make his presence welcome and

his canvass entertaining. He became an adept in reading character and

in playing upon the springs of desire and resolution.

He discovered, too, something to interest and admire in nearly every one

upon whom he called. He was surprised to find how nice people were

generally. He had before known people mainly in the mass, as publics,

as audiences, or congregations. Now he began to know them as

individuals, and to like them, to conceive a sort of social passion for

them, and to desire fervently to do all men good. With this went the

knowledge that he was becoming socially very skillful, and a sense of

still increasing personal power peppered his veins with the sparkle of

new hopes. Ambition flamed once more. The king in his soul was alive

again. He could not only meet people, but handle them. He felt that as

a politician he could win votes, as a lawyer he could sway juries.

He might even turn again to the stage, with the prospect of swifter and

surer success; but he had begun to discover that one cannot go back,

that no life ever flows up-stream.

Yet the thing which really made the stage career no longer possible was

this sense of new powers grown up within him that were not mimetic, but

creative and constructive, and which would insistently demand some other

form of expression.

Besides, the perspective of his life was now long enough for him to look

back and see how all his experiences had enriched him. His very

awkwardness, his temporary blindness, his dramatic ambition, the

calamity which shattered that career and made him a seller of books,

each had been a step into power. His passion for Marien even, while it

was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which taught him self-control and

made his love for Bessie a tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher

devotion than it could otherwise have been.

This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and half-religious, that his

existence was being ordered for him by a power above his own. The

effect of this was to increase his eager zest for life itself. He lived

excitedly, hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him from

behind the next corner.

Meantime, he was making money. Within six months all the bills were

paid and he had more than a thousand dollars in the bank. Rose was out

of the sanitarium and, with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on

the slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting sun

flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide ocean rolled always

in the distance.

John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come when he could go

back to Bessie and tell her of his love. The past seemed very far past

indeed. The memory of those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to

Marien Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced slumber

into which he had sunk but once, and from which he had awakened forever.

Letters had passed frequently between himself and Bessie. On his part,

these were carefully studied and almost devoutly restrained in

expression; but none the less freighted in every line with the fervor of

his growing devotion to her.

On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively rich with the

essence of her own happy, effervescent self as they had always been.

She had expressed a loyal sympathy with him in the shattering of his

stage career, but had commended him for his renunciation, while through

the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to discover for the

first time that Bessie's concurrence in his dramatic ambitions was never

without misgivings. True, she had told him this once, but it was when

he had been too deaf to hear. What pleased John most in this

correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost from letter

to letter, which the big man felt revealed her perception of his growing

love for her.

Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that made it seem

as though his love for Bessie had always been a part of his life, and

the impulse to declare it a legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown

slowly towards perfection.

In this mood a day was set when John would go to Los Angeles to visit

Bessie. As the time approached, he could think of nothing else. On the

morning of that day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he

was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban population

of several hundred thousand people across the Bay from San Francisco,

the largest municipal unit of which is the City of Oakland. But

thoughts of Bessie crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy

clouds that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing power."

As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks long and half a

block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with graceful palms, with tall,

shapely, shiny-leaved acacias, and covered with a thick sod of grass,

laced at intervals by curving walks.

Upon a bench in the very center of this park Hampstead dropped down and

gave himself up to blissful meditations. Across the street from him was

a block of happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great

middle-class folk of America, the one class that John knew well and

sympathetically, for he himself was of it.

On the corner directly before him was a grass-sodded lot, larger than

the others, holding in its center, not a cottage, but a structure of the

country schoolhouse type, painted white, and with a small hooded

vestibule out in front. Over the wide doors admitting to this vestibule

was a transom of glass, on which was painted in very plain letters the

words: CHRISTIAN CHAPEL.

"The house of God does not look so happy as the homes of men hereabout,"

Hampstead remarked, and just then was surprised out of his own thoughts

by seeing the door of the deserted looking chapel open and two men come

out. One was tall and heavy, gray of moustache and red of face, wearing

a silk hat, a white necktie, and a full frock coat.

"An ex-clergyman," voted Hampstead shrewdly, because, aside from his

dress, the man looked aggressively unclerical.

The other was slender, with a black, dejected moustache and also

frock-coated, but the material of the garment was gray instead of black,

and the suit rubbed at the elbows and bagged at the knees. This man

carried a small satchel.

"Some sort of a missionary secretary, I'll bet you," was John's second

venture at identification.

Another incongruous thing about the man with the clerical dress was that

he had a carpenter's hammer in his hand. Dropping this tool upon the

wooden landing, where it clattered loudly, he drew a key from his pocket

and locked the door, shaking it viciously to make sure that it was fast.

Then, descending the steps, with the claw of the hammer he pried loose a

plank, some six or eight feet long, from the wooden walk that ran across

the sod to the concrete pavement in front. The missionary secretary

took one end of this, and the two raised it across the door, where the

ex-clergyman disclosed the fact that his bulging left hand contained

nails, as with swinging blows, he began to cleat the door fast.

"Nailing up God!" commented John, whose mood had become sardonic.

"What's the story, I wonder," he remarked next, and rising, sauntered

across the narrow street and up the wooden walk, till he stopped with

one foot on the lower step, gazing casually, with mild curiosity

expressed upon his face.

The missionary secretary had noted John's advance and appeared to

recognize that his chance interest was legitimate.

"A miserable, squabbling little church," the man remarked, an expression

of pain upon his face. "A disgrace to the communion. I'm the District

Evangelist. I've had to step in from the outside and close it up, in the

interest of peace. Brother Burbeck, here, is a leader of one of the

wings. He has tried to bring peace in vain."

"I have stood up for the Lord against the disturber," announced Brother

Burbeck over his shoulder, while he dealt a vicious blow, as if the head

of the nail were instead the head of the malefactor.

"And who was the disturber?" queried John. "A man of bad character, I

suppose."

"No, you couldn't call him that, could you, Brother Burbeck?" ventured

the District Evangelist. "Just a young man from the Seminary, with his

head overflowing with undigested facts."

"Near facts, they was--_only_," interjected Brother Burbeck

sententiously, as he held another nail between a hard thumb and a

knotted finger, and tapped the head gently to start it.

"Rather undermining the faith of the people in the old Gospel," went on

the Evangelist.

"Takin' away what he couldn't never put back," amended Brother Burbeck,

between blows, and then added accusingly: "He had no respect for the

Elders, not a bit."

Brother Burbeck's tones, as he contributed this additional detail, were

as sharp as his blows.

"You were one of the Elders?" inquired John, in an even voice that might

have been construed to mean respect for the eldership.

"I am one of 'em," corrected the driver of nails. "I preached the old

Jerusalem Gospel myself for twenty years," he affirmed proudly, "until

my health failed, and I went into undertaking."

"You appear to have got your health back," observed John dryly, noting

marks of the hammer upon the plank where the nail heads had been beaten

almost out of sight by his slashing blows.

"Yep," admitted that gentleman, just as dryly.

Looking at Elder Burbeck's large head, with its iron-gray hair, at the

silk hat, which stuck perilously, but persistently, to the back of it;

noticing the folds of oily flesh on his bullock neck, the working of his

broad, fat shoulders, and the sweat standing out on his heavy jowls, as

if protesting mutely this unusual activity discharged with such

vehemence, John made up his mind that he could never like Elder Burbeck.

In his heart he took the part of the disturber.

"You know what this reminds me of, somehow?" he asked, with just a minor

note of accusation in his tone.

"Not being a mind reader, I don't," replied Elder Burbeck, turning on

John a look which showed as plainly as his speech that in the same

interval of time when John was deciding he didn't like Burbeck, Burbeck

was deciding he didn't like John. "What does it?" and the

Elder-undertaker stared fiercely at the book agent.

"Nailing Jesus to the Cross," replied John, shooting a glance at Burbeck

that was hard and beamlike.

"Hey!" exclaimed Burbeck, his red face reddening more.

"But," explained the Secretary, interjecting himself anxiously, as a man

not too proud of his duty that day, "it is in the interests of peace.

We expect to give time a chance to heal the wounds. In six months the

disturbing element will have gone away or given up, and then we can open

the doors to peace and the old faith."

"Oh, I see," said John, as instinctively liking the Missionary Secretary

as he instinctively disliked Brother Burbeck, "it is a movement in

behalf of the _status quo_?"

"Yes," replied the Secretary, smiling faintly, as he noticed the shaft

of humor in John's eye.

"And Brother Burbeck?" John twitched his chin in the direction of the

tipsy silk hat and the vehemently swinging hammer. "He is the apostle

of the _status quo_?"

"Yes," assented the Missionary, smiling yet more faintly, after which he

countered with: "Are you a Christian, my brother?"

"I was a Deacon in the First Church, Los Angeles," answered John, "but

I've been traveling round for a year or so. Hampstead's my name."

The Secretary's face lighted with unexpected pleasure.

"How do you do, Brother Hampstead," he exclaimed, putting out his hand

quickly. "My name's Harding."

"Glad to meet you, Brother Harding," said John; "I've seen your name in

the church papers."

"Brother Burbeck, this is Brother Hampstead, of the First Church, Los

Angeles," announced Harding, when that gentleman, having driven his last

nail and smashed the plank a parting blow with his hammer, turned to

them again.

Elder Burbeck's manner instantly changed. "Oh, one of our brethren, eh,

Hampstead? Why, say, I remember hearing you talk one night down there

in Christian Endeavor when I was down at the Undertakers' Convention.

They told me you were going on the stage. That's how I remember you so

well, I guess."

"I got over that nonsense," said John easily. "Sorry to hear you've

been having trouble in your little church."

"It's been a mighty sad case," sighed the Elder, heaving his ponderous

bosom and mopping his red brow and scalp, for the removal of his hat

revealed that his iron-gray hair was only a fringe.

"By the way," asked John, who was contemplating the bulletin board,

"what about the Sunday school? I see it's down for nine forty-five."

"Dwindled to a handful of children," declared Burbeck, as if a handful

of children was something entirely negligible.

John had a reason for feeling especially tender where the feelings of

children were concerned.

"But they'll come next Sunday, and they'll be terribly disappointed," he

urged. "It will shake their faith in God himself. They won't

understand at all, will they?"

"I reckon they will when they see the church nailed up," answered

Burbeck grimly, quite too triumphant over spiking an enemy's guns to

consider the mystified, wondering soul of childhood as it might stand

before that nailed door four mornings forward from this, for the day of

the crucifixion of the door was Wednesday.

Their task completed, the Elder and the Evangelist were turning toward

the street. "Good-by, Brother," said Harding, again shaking hands.

"Oh, good-by, Brother Hampstead," exclaimed Burbeck, turning as if he

had forgotten something, and offering his stout, once sinewy palm.

John gave it a grip that shook the huge frame of Elder Burbeck, and made

him feel, as he seldom felt about any man, that here was a personality

and a physical force at least as vigorous as his own.

"Good-by, Brother Burbeck," John responded, with an open smile; and then

while the two men took themselves down the street in the direction of

the car line, the book-agent went back and sat contemplatively in the

park.

It was a marvelously pleasant day. A few fleecy clouds were drifting

overhead, revealing patches of the unrivaled blue of California's sky

above them. The sun shone warmly when the clouds were not in the way,

and when they were, the lazy breeze made its breath seem cooler and more

bracing, as if to compensate for the absence. Down the street two or

three blocks Hampstead could see the Bay waters dancing in the sunlight.

The cottages on both sides of the park were embowered with vines, roses

mostly, white roses and red, with here and there a giant bougainvillea,

some of its lavender, clusterlike flowers abloom, and some of them still

sealed in their transparent pods that looked like envelopes of

isinglass.

High in the blue an occasional pigeon circled; off to the left a kite

appeared, sailing high, and bounding vigorously when the upper air

currents freshened.

On John's own level, the world was faring onward very happily.

About every cottage there was an air of nature's cheer and a suggestion

of blooming activity. Only the little church looked hopeless and

abandoned of men, the letters of its name staring out big-eyed and

lonely from above the glass transom, while the plank of the _status

quo_, nailed rudely across its front, was a brutal advertisement of its

dishonored state.

"Some day," mused John, "I think I'll build a church, and I believe I'll

build it to look like a cottage, with roses round it and bougainvilleas

and palms, with broad verandas, inviting lawns, and bowering vines.

I'll make it the most homey looking place in the whole neighborhood,

with a rustic sign stuck up somewhere that says 'The Home of God', or

something like that."

Still musing, the scornful words spoken to John by Scofield more than a

year ago on the steps of the Pacific Union Club, came idling into his

mind: "Remember! You're not an actor! You're a preacher." He smiled as

he recalled Scofield's irritation at the idea, and his own. How

ridiculously impossible it had seemed then and seemed to-day! And it

was still so irritating as to stir him into getting up and walking away

from the little chapel in the direction of the street car. Yet his mind

reverted to the closed door.

"Won't they be disappointed, though? Those children!"

At the corner he turned and looked back as if to make sure. Yes, there

was the weather-worn streak upon the door, at that reckless angle which

proclaimed the mood of the man who placed it there.

"And they nailed up God!" Hampstead commented grimly, swinging upon his

car.

That afternoon at five o'clock he left for Los Angeles.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE*

It was three o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and John was sitting happily

in the Mitchell living-room in Los Angeles, waiting for Bessie to come

from school. Mrs. Mitchell stood on the threshold, dressed for the

street save for her gloves, at one of which she was tugging.

"I have always felt, Mr. Hampstead, that you were a very good influence

for Bessie," she was saying guilefully, "and I do wish you would talk

her out of that university idea. She graduates from High in June, you

know; and she talks nothing, thinks nothing, dreams nothing but

university, university, uni-v-e-r-s-i-t-y!" Mrs. Mitchell's

elocutionary climax was calculated to convey a very fine impression of

utter weariness with the word and with the idea; but John, who had

flushed with gratification at the crafty compliment, would not be

swerved by either guile or scorn from an instinctive loyalty to Bessie

and her ideals.

"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," he said soberly. "My heart wouldn't be

in it. Bessie has a wonderful mind. You should give her every

advantage."

"Well, talk her out of Stanford, then," compromised Mrs. Mitchell, as if

in her mind she had already surrendered, as she knew she must. "She's

determined to go there. Stanford is a kind of man's school, from what I

hear. Lots of the Phrosos are going to U.C."

"But if I rather favor Stanford myself?" suggested Hampstead, feeling

his way carefully.

The front door opened and closed, and John's heart leaped at the sound

of a light footstep in the hall. As if hearing voices, the owner of the

footsteps turned them towards the living room.

Book strap in hand, wearing a white shirt waist and skirt of blue, with

the brown crinkly hair breaking out from under a small straw hat worn

jauntily askew, Bessie paused upon the threshold, her eyes a-sparkle

with expectancy.

"John!" she exclaimed, with a little shriek of joy. "You--you old dear!"

and she came literally bounding across the room to greet him as he rose

and advanced eagerly.

Hampstead thought he had never seen such a glowing picture of animal

health and exuberance of life.

"Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Mitchell, addressing her daughter with chiding in

her tones. "Why don't you throw your arms around him and be done with

it?"

Bessie blushed, but John covered her confusion by exclaiming:

"I almost did that myself, Mrs. Mitchell, I was so glad to see her!"

Whereupon he laughed hilariously, it was such a good joke; and Bessie

laughed, turning her face well away from her mother, while Mrs. Mitchell

laughed most heartily of all at the thought of John Hampstead putting

his arms around any woman, except, of course, as he might have done in

the practice of his late profession.

"And now," declared Mrs. Mitchell, as she managed the last button of her

glove, "I must abandon you to yourselves; but don't sit here paying

compliments. Get out into the air somewhere."

"Oh, let's," assented Bessie, with animation. "Only wait till I change

my hat!"

"Don't," pleaded John. "I like that one."

"But I have another you'll like better," called Bessie over her

shoulder, for already she was racing out of the room past her mother.

"Good-by. Have a good time!" Mrs. Mitchell lifted her voice toward her

daughter racing up the stairs, and then turning, waved her ridiculous

folding sunshade at John as she adjured: "Give her your very best

advice!"

"Never doubt it," echoed John, with the sudden feeling of a man who is

left alone in a house to guard great riches.

"How do you like it?"

Bessie had taken a whole half-hour to change her hat, but her dress had

been changed as well, to something white and filmy that reached below

the shoe-tops and by those few inches of extra length added a surprising

look of maturity to the pliant youthfulness of her figure. This was

heightened by a surplice effect in the bodice forming a V, which

accentuated the rounded fullness of the bosom and gave a hint of the

charm and power of a most bewitching woman, ripening swiftly underneath

the artless beauty of the girl.

"Wonderful!" John exclaimed rapturously, rising as she entered.

Bessie's mood was lightly happy. His was deeply reverent, and there was

a world of devotion and tenderness in the look he gave her, which

thrilled through the girl like an ecstasy.

All the past was coming up to John's mind, all the long past of their

friendship with its gradual ripening into normal, all-comprehending

love, but still he was searching her uplifted face as if for a final

confirmation of the oneness of the vision of his love with this

materialization of youth and woman mingling; for he must make no mistake

this time.

Yes, the confirmation was complete. It was the true face of his dream.

In it was everything which he had hoped to find there. Marien Dounay

had made woman mean more to him than woman had ever meant before. But

here in the upturned, trusting face of Bessie, with its sparkle in the

eyes and its sunny witchery in the dimples, there was something

infinitely richer and more satisfying than experience or imagination had

been able to suggest.

Here, he told himself reverently, was every blessing that God had

compounded for the happiness of man. And it was his,--modestly,

trustfully his. Every detail of her expression and her beauty, every

subtly playing current of her personality, made him know it. He had but

to declare himself and reach out and take her like a lover.

But, strangely, he could do neither. An awe was on him. He felt like

falling down upon his knees and thanking God, but not like taking her;

not like touching her even, though he could not resist that when Bessie

extended frankly both her hands, quite in the old manner of cordial,

happy comradeship. John took them in his, and as she returned his touch

with the warm frank clasp that was characteristic of her hearty nature,

he got anew the sense of the woman in her. It swept over him like an

intoxication that was rare and wonderful, like no rapture he had ever

known before--half-spiritual but half wholly human--therefore with

something in it that frightened him.

"Bessie," he asked, abruptly, "could we get away from here quickly--in a

very few minutes--away from men and houses and things?"